More Of A Daughter
by chemicalkat
Summary: A post Living Doll fic, which deals with Sara's death and Brass's initial response to it.  Contains references to GSR. This is NOT a SaraBrass romance fic, and contains references to charachter death.  Rated M for language.


Disclaimer: I don't own anything or anyone. If only I did.

I was my own beta here, so all mistakes are my own responsibility. This is my first fic, so I would appreciate any guidance you would care to give. Thank you.

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Brass's mouth was set into a grim line and his eyes were narrowed. Warm, bitter tears gathered there as he verbally confirmed the identity of the body. _No, not a body...Sara._ His voice caught in his throat and emerged a little more strained and higher than it usually did. How much fucking confirmation could they need? How many other women were found under a wrecked Mustang in Vegas that night? The last time he had cried was because of his wayward daughter. And yet the woman he cried for now had been more his kid in the few years he'd known her than Ellie ever had.

Clenching his teeth, he silently cursed the search and rescue teams. Why were they going so fucking slow? _Hurry up and get that heap of trash off her._ He didn't care that it couldn't hurt her any more...that it had served its purpose, done its macabre job. It just _violated_ her by being there.

He bent down to touch Sara's hand, choking a sob and briefly closing his eyes.

It made him sick to his stomach that he was close enough to touch her now, but when it had really mattered, they had all been too far from her. _Too many miles, too many hours. _Her nails were encrusted with blood and dirt. _From clawing...she had been conscious, she had known._ He reached out to touch her, but he couldn't do it. No matter what the rules were about not touching a body before a coroner arrived, he'd often broken them and had contact with his fair share of corpses in the past. _No_..._NOT a corpse...Sara_. He was familiar the the emptiness, the coldness. He couldn't bare to feel that eerie coldness on Sara, his mind couldn't classify her as dead. It would be wrong not to feel warmth on her. It would be too real.

He looked at her face, smeared with dirt, but serenely peaceful. Another tear threatened to fall, which he hurriedly wiped away. He wasn't one to cry in front of others. His agony would be his own, later, at home, with a bottle of whiskey and old ghosts. _And some new ones._

Brass had stopped believing in a God a long time ago, as a rookie, when every day he saw the pits of humanity. The sight before him now could only ever reinforce that. But somehow he prayed to the God in whom he did not believe, that Grissom wouldn't come here to see her like this. By the time he arrived, she should be on a coroners trolley, ready to be taken away. _If they would ever get a move on lifting this fucking car_. Better still, in the morgue. Clean, peaceful, covered in a perfect white sheet. It was better Grissom only saw this scene through the miniature...small scale, clinical, _cold. _But he corrected himself. Grissom saw the grisly befores-and-afters every day. He wouldn't be fooled by the theatre of death. None of them would. They'd all see the terrible truth behind the careful work of the coroner, they'd all survey the crime scene photos. He felt sure that Grissom would demand to oversee the collection of evidence. The last thing he would ever do for the woman he loved.

He had no idea how Grissom would manage to come to terms with this. He remembered the night he had discovered they were together. He'd been in a bar on the strip, double bourbon on the rocks, September 4th. 15 years to the day since his wife had left him, started divorce proceedings, blaming his long hours, his affair, his drinking, anything she could find, or better still, fabricate, to get the divorce courts on her side. Every September 4th he marked the occasion in a bar, with double bourbon on the rocks, first in Jersey, then later on the Strip. It was a tradition he kept with himself. It was then he saw it. Just a brief glance. Grissom walking past the window, with a woman? He tried to put it from his mind, swirling his whiskey in the glass, as though silently accusing it of making him see things. But he couldn't forget it. Her hair, her walk, he'd seen someone unmistakably familiar...Sara. His sharp mind quickly added things up. The matching days off. Hell, the days off themselves were enough to pique his suspicion. The little looks they shared and thought no one else noticed. Except him. And he had just put it down to more dancing, more "two steps forward, five back" that he'd witnessed all these years. He half chuckled to himself, and murmured "_Good on him_" into his whiskey glass, his macho demeanour masking a hint of melancholy that the two closest people he had to friends were now embroiled in the same intense love that he was there that night to mourn.

The angry groan of metal brought him back to the present. The car was awkwardly placed, and was still periodically shifting and settling. The lab would know by now. Grissom would know. They would be on their way. He was sure that tomorrow, or next week, or whenever the numbness wore off, he would feel a stab of guilt that he didn't tell them himself. But he had to be here. With the..._with Sara_. He recalled a particularly harrowing case a while back, involving the starvation of a little boy. He rarely asked advice, he thought he didn't need it. But on this occasion he had sought counsel from Sara. He trusted her. _"Go with the living, Jim, the dead can wait."_. Inside, he knew he should have applied it to the events of tonight. But he couldn't. Because that would mean that Sara was dead. (_And that was just ridiculous...right?)_

"I'm sorry, kiddo" he whispered, the inadequacy of his words stinging his mouth as they left it. "I'm sorry".

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Fin. A sequel may follow.


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